The Guardians

by Andrew Pyper

  The project of Being a Man had shifted with overnight suddenness, so that we awakened one morning with the hungover certainty that something was wrong. All the things we had been working for, what we had managed to achieve, now required maintenance. For most it is a home, a family. For Randy, an acting career limited to bit parts and commercials. For me, it was Retox, the girlfriend with a bar code tattooed on her inner thigh. Whatever it was, it would prove to be too much. Some of it was bound to slip away. It had been slipping away.

  But here Randy and I are together again. Overdressed and middle-aged, improbably standing in a bare room of the Queen's Hotel like actors in a Beckett play who've forgotten their lines.

  You too.

  That's what we see in each other's eyes, what we silently share in the pause between recognition and brotherly embrace.

  I see it got you too.

  "Well," Randy says, slapping both of my shoulders. "We're here."

  "Yes, we goddamn are."

  "Have you been around town yet? It's like a time capsule. The world's most pointless time capsule."

  "Can't wait to see all the sights."

  "I guess Ben's the only one who could have brought us back."

  "Ben's the only one who could have got us to do a whole lot of things."

  I was referring only to harmless stuff, of how Ben could talk us into goofing around with a Ouija board or playing Dungeons & Dragons, but as soon as it was out, I heard how it could seem that I was speaking of something else.

  "You know what's funny?" Randy announces finally. "The last time I was in the Queen's, it was with Tina Uxbridge."

  "Todd Flanagan's girlfriend?"

  "It was her idea, swear to God. I liked Todd. But I liked Tina more."

  "She had his kid, didn't she? In grade twelve or something?" And then: "Jesus, Randy. Maybe it was yours."

  "Not mine. Trust me, I checked the calendar."

  "Wait. I'm still a little dizzy here. You slept with Tina Uxbridge?"

  "Just down the hall."

  "You amaze me, Randy."

  "And she amazed me."

  I look around the room, checking the corners.

  "I tried," Randy says. "Followed up again on every number Carl ever gave me. Nobody knows where he is."

  "He ought to be here."

  "Did you ever talk to him?"

  "Not much the last few years."

  "So you never saw him after things got bad."

  The two of us still standing in the room's entryway. I should move aside, give us some space. But I need to hear what Randy is now obliged to tell me.

  "He was using, Trev."

  "Did you—I don't know—confront him?"

  "Confront Carl?"

  "No. I wouldn't have either."

  "He called every once in a while. Then, maybe two years ago, even the calls stopped."

  "He never called me."

  "He was ashamed," Randy says. "He looked up to you more than any of us."

  "He did?"

  "The best hockey player. Successful businessman. You were steady."

  I'd been standing with my arms crossed over my chest. Now I release them, hold them out in front of me and let them shake. "Who's steady now?"

  It's meant as a joke, but it only makes Randy uncomfortable. I step aside to let him into the room. He goes and stands at the window. Speaking against the glass.

  "I visited Mrs. McAuliffe this morning," he says. "Apparently Ben had a will. And he named you executor of his estate."

  "What estate?"

  "You mean aside from some hockey cards and a jar of dimes? Not much."

  The room closes in on us, stifling even the idea of speech. It's not that we've so quickly run out of things to say, but that there's too much.

  Randy turns to face me. "What are we going to do?" "In Grimshaw? At three-thirty on a Thursday afternoon?" I shuffle over to Randy and deliver a smart smack to the side of his face. "Let's get a drink."

  * * *

  MEMORY DIARY

  Entry No. 5

  We were sitting in music class on a Tuesday morning in early February, waiting for Miss Langham to walk in and give us one of her let's-get-started smiles, when Ben turned around in his chair to face me and whispered, "I had the most fucked-up dream last night."

  There was nothing unusual in this. Miss Langham was often a minute or two late for us, her first class of the day. She had a gift for comic entrances. We never laughed at Miss Langham, though. We were too busy fixing her quirks into our memory: the sound of her footsteps scuffing hurriedly down the hall and—slap!—a dropped textbook on the floor, followed by a Girl Scout cuss that we held our breath in order to hear.

  Butternuts!

  Frick!

  Then her hand gripped on the doorframe, spinning her into the room. Her flushed apology. The wisp of hair that had come loose and she now curled her lower lip to blow out of her eyes. The later she was, the better we behaved.

  As for Ben, he was always having dreams. Surreal, circular narratives he would begin relating to me as we waited for Miss Langham, laying his flute on his lap and leaning back, making sure we weren't being overheard, as though the latest clip from his subconscious was something others were eager to monitor, to use.

  Ben's dreams were a little strange. What was stranger was when he saw people who weren't there:

  A man with goat horns, standing at the top of his attic stairs.

  A boy with one arm freshly cut off and waving wildly with the other, as though to a departing ship, standing in Ben's backyard when he looked up while mowing the lawn.

  An old woman who might have been his grandmother if she hadn't died the year before, looking out from his bedroom closet, red scars in place of eyes.

  On this Tuesday, waiting for Miss Langham's arrival, what was a little out of the ordinary wasn't Ben telling me he'd had another weird dream the night before, but how he looked when he did. His skin showing tiny blue veins, as it did after he'd sat, unplayed, for a couple of hours in a freezing-cold ice rink.

  "I'm not even sure it was a dream," he said.

  "What was it about?"

  "Me, looking out my bedroom window. Everything like the way it is when I'm awake. The one streetlight that works, the one that doesn't. The trees, the houses. Nothing happening. I'm almost falling asleep—like a kind of double sleep, because it's a dream, right? And then, there's . . . something."

  "Something?"

  "I don't even really see it. I just notice that something is different. Something that's moving."

  "What was it?"

  "I told you, I didn't really see it."

  "The thing you didn't see. What'd it look like?"

  "Like the shadow of a tree, maybe. But not."

  "So it had feet? This tree?"

  "It wasn't a tree."

  "A person, then."

  "I guess."

  I looked to the door. I was more than ready for Miss Langham.

  "I don't think it was alone," Ben said.

  "There were two people?"

  "I got the idea it was holding on to someone."

  "And where'd it take them?"

  "Round the side of the Thurman house. It was scary, Trev. Seriously."

  "Good thing it was just a dream."

  "I told you. I'm not sure it was."

  "What's wrong with you? You okay?"

  "I... I think . . . you . . ."

  "You look like you're going to puke."

  I remember pulling my feet out from under his chair, just in case.

  Ben took a deep breath. Swallowed. "You need to hear the fucked-up part."

  "Okay."

  "Like I said, I couldn't really see. But I could feel who it was. The person it was carrying into the house."

  "Into the house? I thought you said it just went round—"

  "Good mor-ning!"

  Not Heather. A buxom lady in support hose writing her name on the blackboard. We'd seen her before, doing the same thing at the front of o
ur math, geography, history classes.

  "Where's Miss Langham?" I asked without raising my hand. Then, after not getting an answer: "Where's Heather?"

  The supply teacher kept writing her name. In fact, she slowed down to buy the extra second required to come up with an answer to the question she knew was coming next. A question that came from Randy.

  "Is she okay?"

  The supply teacher put down her chalk. Thumbed her glasses back up the slippery bridge of her nose.

  "Miss Langham is unavailable at this time," she said.

  And before we could ask anything else, she was tapping her baton and telling us to open our sheet music to "The Maple Leaf Forever."

  Something else was worth noting from later that afternoon. A good deed.

  We went to visit Paul Schantz in the Cedarfield Seniors

  Home as part of a "community outreach" program the Guardians' board of directors thought up, the idea being that team players would go to visit kids with cancer or other fans who couldn't make the games, and someone from the Beacon would be there to take a picture for the next day's paper. It didn't turn out that way. In fact, Randy, Ben, Carl and I were the only ones to sign up.

  According to the scrawled letter he sent the coach, Paul Schantz was a Guardian himself "during the war" (meaning the First World War, I figured out when I did the math). When we arrived, he'd been wheeled out to meet us wearing a team jersey so big he looked like a wrinkly dwarf inside of it. Then we pushed him to his room, too small for the five of us. We wanted to leave after two minutes.

  "You have any kids?" Carl attempted at one point.

  Paul pinched his chin. "I'd say we had eighteen over the years." He was recovering from a stroke, so it was hard to know exactly what he said. Then he explained that he and his wife had been foster parents.

  "You ever miss them?" Ben asked.

  His face clouded over. "All of them. Except one."

  "A bad apple."

  "There's bad. Then there's worth."

  "Worth? Worth in what?"

  "Worse. Worse!" He fought to get this out, leaving his chin white with spit. "There's always something worse than you think. Closer than you think."

  That was about it. One by one my friends excused themselves to visit the men's room and didn't come back. Until only I was left.

  "It's been good to meet you, Mr. Schantz," I said, backing toward the door. "And I hope we can bring the cup home this year, just like—"

  "There's some places you should never go."

  It was a strange thing to say, if in fact he said it. But I remember the moment not for the words I thought I heard him mumble, but for the look on the old man's face. A kind of insane clarity.

  He was talking about the Thurman house. I couldn't say why I was so sure, other than the look of him. He'd been just this withered stranger, his legs painful- looking sticks on the footrests, yet now he was sitting forward, his eyes alive and searching.

  Then he collapsed back into his wheelchair. I was wrong: he wasn't reading my mind. As I slipped out, I heard him mutter, "Sometimes I wet my back."

  I bet, I thought as I made my way toward Ben, Randy and Carl, who stood waiting at the end of the hall. Doesn't mean I have to be there the next time you do.

  But before I reached them, I heard the old man's words a different way.

  Sometimes the dead come back.

  I already mentioned that my father worked for the utilities commission. A union rep with his own office in the basement of Municipal Hall, back in the days when offices had ashtrays and a bottle of whisky in the bottom drawer and windowless doors that could lock shut. He didn't work too hard.

  But he often brought stories home with him. Juicy stuff, as far as Grimshaw went. Battles between neighbours over the staking of property lines. The mayor owing five grand in parking tickets. Noise complaints against an apartment behind Roma Pizza, from which a woman's shrieking orgasms (or what my dad called "the sounds of a cat in heat") awakened dozens in the night.

  Because they shared a filing system, police gossip would also flow through the basement of Municipal Hall. Usually, this side of my father's nightly news was sad more than thrilling. Domestic knockabouts, drunk-driving charges, old people discovered a few days dead on their linoleum floors.

  Yet that night, I could tell my father had a scoop when he took his place at the head of the kitchen table. Hands placed on either side of his dinner plate, staring down at what my mother had spooned out of the casserole dish with the sombre look of a judge reading a jury's verdict to himself before announcing it to the court.

  "Langham," he said finally. "She's a teacher of yours, right? The pretty one?"

  "Music," I said.

  "She wasn't at school today."

  "No."

  I watched him use his knife to bulldoze food onto the back of his fork. Slip it into his mouth. Chew.

  "What about her?" I asked once he'd swallowed.

  "They're looking for her."

  "They?"

  "It'll be in the paper in the morning."

  "She's not just sick or something?"

  "That's what I'm hearing. The cops. Asking if anyone's seen her."

  "The police think she's a missing person after one day? Don't they usually wait seventy-two hours or something?"

  "They've got information. Suspicions." My father raised his hands, palms out. A gesture to signal the limits of his insider's knowledge.

  "Do they think she's all right?"

  My father lowered his fork. Pretty. That's what his eyes said to me, man to man across the table. I don't blame you.

  "My guess?" he said. "She found some fella and got the hell out of here. Struck me as a sensible sort of girl."

  Then he told my mother this might be her best shepherd's pie ever.

  After hockey practice that night, we gathered at Ben's house. Sitting on the mouldy pillows and atop the books that towered around his bed. And on it, cross-legged, was Ben himself. I remember he wasn't wearing shoes or socks. His feet oversized, patchy with hair. Nasty feet for such a slight, dream-prone boy.

  I had told them earlier what my dad had said. We were lacing our skates in the dressing room, and I had to whisper to keep from being overheard by any of the other players. Once I finished, there wasn't a chance to hear their reactions, as the coach poked his head around the corner and told us to hustle out there, that holding on to the lead up our asses wasn't going to help us beat the Sugar Kings on the weekend. But even as he said this—in the same way he would have at any other evening practice—I thought his eyes lingered on us for a moment. An unreadable expression contained only in the look itself, as the rest of his face was kindly as usual. Yet in his eyes there was sadness, or distress, something he couldn't wholly contain. Or maybe something he wanted us to see. A feeling he shared. Was protecting us from.

  Up in Ben's room, I learned that I wasn't the only one to have heard Heather Langham rumours. On the bus rides home from school, in our kitchens, whispered between our parents, we heard versions of a story—or pieces of a handful of stories—beginning to circulate around town.

  First, there was Miss Langham running off with a student.

  Nobody had seen Brad Wickenheiser today, had they? There was an absurd but persistent rumour that he'd done it with Mrs. Avery, the vice-principal, on a school trip to see Othello in Stratford. And he was in Heather's grade twelve music class. French horn. (French horny, as he called it, idiotically, to the girls on either side of him.) According to Randy's source, Brad Wickenheiser and Miss Langham were doing it right now out at the Swiss Cottage Motel on the edge of town. He was in love with her. But she was just in it for the sex with a young stud. I remember that phrase in particular: young stud. The way it made me uncomfortable, and a little jealous, like standing in the showers with the older boys after a game.

  "Really?" I asked when Randy was done with his breathless telling. "Really?"

  "Bullshit," Carl said.

  "It's what I hea
rd."

  "Carl's right," I said. "Brad Wickenheiser? No way. He's a moron."

  "She's not screwing his brain, Trev."

  "Still. I'm not buying it."

  "Neither am I. And I'll tell you why," Carl said, jabbing a finger into Randy's chest. "It's bullshit because it's my bullshit. Told Andy Pucinik in gym. Born-again Jesus Saves wanker. I knew he'd like it."

  Then Carl told his own story, a more fanciful version of my father's dinner-table suggestion that Miss Langham had simply left town. But this time it wasn't her tiring of Grimshaw that prompted her to take off without warning—it was an identical twin sister. A Langham girl just as beautiful as Heather, but without the winning manners. The bad Heather.

  "Aha!" Randy said. "Maybe it's the twin who's banging Brad Wickenheiser at the Swiss Cottage."

  And then came the horror story. All the more horrific for being the most believable. And for me being the one to tell it.

  An anonymous tip had been called in to the police. Male, gravel-voiced. Telling the cops he'd had "some kinda fun" the night before, taunting them to go see "where that bitch used to sleep." When they got to the nurses' residence the police found sticky boot prints on the carpet outside Heather's room. They kicked the door down. Inside, walls sprayed with blood. Obscene messages fingerpainted in gore over her Leonard Bernstein and Mozart posters. But no body. Only a necklace laid over her pillow, the heart-shaped locket we had seen her wear in class some days, and wondered whose image might be contained within, impossibly wishing it might be ours.

  According to this version, her murderer was a mysterious lover-turned-stalker, an attractive sociopath who gave her the locket (he gave all his girlfriends lockets). She had come to Grimshaw after he started to show signs of being unstable. But he'd found her.

  It was only when I finished that we noticed the snow. The first squall of the season dropping heavy flakes over town, whitening and silencing.

  "That's not it."

  Ben's voice surprised us. For the past while, it seemed like he wasn't even listening, and we had come to nearly forget he was here. But now we were all looking at him. Watching his head slowly shake from side to side.